“They came with the rush of the southern surf,
on the bar of the storm-girt bay;
and like muffled drums on the sounding turf
their hoof-strokes echo away.”
I know no poetry that describes the rush of horsemen quite as Gordon
does. Take this description of the Balaclava charge from his “Lay of the
Last Charger.”
“Now we were close to them, every horse striding
madly;—St. Luce pass’t with never a groan;—
Sadly my master look’d round—he was riding—
on the boy’s right, with a line of his own.
“Thrusting his hand in his breast or breast-pocket,
while from his wrist the sword swung by a chain,
swiftly he drew out some trinket or locket,
kiss’t it (I think) and replaced it again.
“Burst, while his fingers reclined on the haft,
jarring concussion and earth-shaking din,
Horse counter’d horse, and I reel’d, _but he laugh’t,_
_down went his man, cloven clean to the chin_!”
Lord Tennyson has watched his charge through Mr. Russell’s field-glass,
and we follow his view of it, but Gordon has ridden it and takes us with
him. Old and miserable, the friend of the man who had ridden this “Last
Charger,” offers up the same prayer as the man who had “visioned it in
the smoke:”
“Would to God I had died with your master, old man,”
for—
“he was never more happy in life than in death.”
What I find so admirable in Gordon, and in almost all his characters is,
that they are _men_, I mean _men_ as opposed to dreamers or students.
His Lancelot _is_ Lancelot, the knight who has lived and loved largely.
Tennyson’s is not. I must confess that I really think that “The Rhyme
of Joyous Guard” is worth all the other “Idylls of the King,” save
“Lancelot and Elaine,” and “The Passing of Arthur,” put together. I mean
that I really think it has more real deep true significance. Take this
conclusion, the last prayer of Lancelot, old and passed from the world:
“If ever I smote as a man should smite,
if I struck one stroke that seem’d good in Thy sight,
by Thy loving mercy prevailing,
Lord! let her stand in the light of Thy face,
cloth’d with Thy love, and crown’d with Thy grace,
when I gnash my teeth in the terrible place
that is fill’d with weeping and wailing.”
This is splendid! His men, I say, are _men_, men such as we find in
Byron. Orion (Satan) says that
“The angel Michael was once my foe;
_He had a little the best of our strife,_
_yet he never could deal so stark a blow._”
The lover in “No Name,” thinking of meeting “the slayer of the soul” he
loved, says:
“And I know that if, here or there, alone,
I found him fairly, and face to face,
_having slain his body, I would slay my own,_
_that my soul to Satan his soul might chase_:”
a remark in the strain of Heathcliff. Most of his lovers love
passionately and sensuously, and only passionately and sensuously: The
poet “revels in the rosy whiteness of that golden-headed girl:” if one
thing is harder to forgive to a successful rival than another it is that
“he has held her long in his arms,
and has kissed her over and over again:”
his chief regret over a dear dead girl is
“for the red that never was fairly kiss’d—
for the white that never was fairly press’d:”
and, when he leaves his love for ever, he is in anguish at the thought
that
“’twill, doubtless, be another’s lot
those very lips to press:”
a remark in the more morbid strain of Keats to Fanny Brawne.
When Lancelot first kisses Guinevere, he, the mighty knight, “well nigh
swoons.” Love, with Gordon’s lovers, “consumes their hearts with a fiery
drought.” “Laurence,” says Estelle to her lover,
“Laurence, you kiss me too hard:”
and the man of “Britomarte” is at hand with the appropriate criticism that
“men at the bottom are merely brutes.”
But we must not think that _all_ Gordon’s lovers love in this way, any
more than that all his men merely charge and cheer. The battle is over.
“And what then? The colours reversed, the drums muffled,
the black nodding plumes, the dead march and the pall,
the stern faces, soldier-like, silent, unruffled,
the slow sacred music that floats over all.”
This is beautiful, and no less beautiful is the tenderness of his love.
“A grim grey coast, and a sea-board ghastly,
and shores trod seldom by feet of men—
where the batter’d hulk and the broken mast lie,
they have lain embedded these long years ten.
_Love! when we wandered here together,_
_hand in hand through the sparkling weather,_
_from the heights and hollows of fern and heather,_
_God surely loved us a little then._”